A pictorial lowdown on some very different comprehensive wonder years...

You gotta work for our respect.

These archers know how to handle themselves... The bows plunge deep into the bark of the biggest trees, they'd make mincemeat out of my neck for sure - better stay clear (though there is a little Robin Hood in me who wants to learn how to split an apple from 20 - or was it 100? - paces).

A kindergarten class led by teacher Oo Ni Kay.

22nd November. The day the computers arrived. And these were theirs - no teachers' paws allowed on these!

Here the Christian half of the school pray for God to thank the teachers for their service to the students during the school year just past - at the annual Teacher award ceremony. A minute later the Buddhist half of the school embarks on its thanks, side by side the God-fearing folk. The religious pluralism (along with the ethnic and cultural pluralities on display) of the school are a joy to behold given the deep divisions or unspoken mistrust between followers of the different paths as seen across the camp. Thankfully, lines of friendship do not run accordant to religious divisions.

The exciting but uniform-looking presents in the foreground (between the delightful rubber flowers) are gifts for the teachers; the students hand them out to those bored-looking professionals at the back at the end of the ceremony. As the ceremony took place on the day I had arrived back in the camp, I think I wasn't expected, and ended up getting a present bound for the cook (fortunately he wasn't around to fight me for it). The gift, like all the presents, was a longyi - thankfully a bit bigger than my other one which gravity likes to toy with whenever possible. You know, I do hope the cook got a present in the end.

Walter also bought the students a digital camera. Coupled to the computers delivered late last year, this is proving a wonderful tool to capture and record student life - and teach important lessons in the mastery of this or that computer function. Eh Ser Say, the NGSO chairperson, is responsible for the rather pricey mega-pixellated Sony gadgetry, and here is caught in the very photographic act. The camera means students, for the first time, have access to a way of committing some part of their lives to digital or canvas record. A photo is one of the most highly prized possessions here - on any visit you can be sure to have hosts proudly show you their ageing but adored photo collection. Slowly but surely my snapper and I are getting round all the students and giving them one photo to choose/pose for and keep.

The exposure trip - an educational innovation brought in by the latest education committee chairperson (Ko Salai) - cheap at the 60,000 baht price. This year 7 students were chosen for their academic success and contribution to the wider aspects of school and student life, and were thus given the opportunity to experience the world outside of a refugee camp - for the first time. The exposure trip is a two-week, slightly covert, all expenses-paid trip to Chiang Mai, filled with visits to democracy-advocating organisations (Irrawaddy, National Health and Education Committee, Democratic Party for a New Society...) and a variety of sights around the leafy city (the zoo, Wat Doi Suthep...). On their return (and as shown here) the seven seriously envied students held various feedback sessions with the remainder of the school children - sat open-mouthed listening to the adventures of their friends as they set eyes upon and tackled new experience after new experience...

Ready and waiting for the day to begin at nine... (though they've been up for four and a half hours already, studying, cleaning, washing, sweeping...)

The daily iron. Not quite the steam-powered, purified-water-spurting super-slider one may have come to love or villify back home, but an iron made from (let me think...) iron, complete with flip-top lid and handle, where inside can be placed hot coals to help press out those annoying creases for any teachers or head-teachers who fancy clothes with a certain (slavish) sparkle.

The Saturday Smoke. With path sweeping and rubbish collecting over, it's time to set light to yesterday's usefuls and out of date foliage - a quick flick of a lighter, a beady eye of a student, and a significant proportion of the camp's waste disappears into the skies. The leaves have to go up in smoke - their ground coverage turns already steep slopes into deadly, transient and unpredictable underfoot surfaces - ripe and ready to present a gravitational challenge to any unsuspecting westerners heading their way.

The building of the new school boarding area over by the school at Pwe Bo Loo has necessitated a frantic search for bamboo and hardwood logs, as funding and supplies from the Burma Border Consortium (BBC) have been delayed for reasons I can't quite make out. As a result, disused buildings in Section 13 have all bitten the dust, their reusable bamboo and wooden components loaded onto pick-ups (or children's shoulders) for the extremely sweaty twenty-minute journey to their new home. One by one the new buildings are going up, deployed around the circumference of Yaung Ni Oo itself, on land far less mountainous, sloping and precarious than the past year-and-a-half's lodgings have experienced.

Heading off to school from the girls dorm on a Monday or Friday, replete with pan sets stuffed with rice and a simple curry for the teachers at lunchtime. The procession of green and white heading off to Yaung Ni Oo is a sight to see.

Heading down to the river on the way to school. It must be a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday - the student on the right has a blue longyi on. Most kids own beautiful home-made Karen shoulder bags, but an increasing number have bootleg / fake backpacks brought in from Mae Sariang or Chiang Mai at a fraction of the cost of their Western counterparts. Long-lasting they're not, but repairable they are: except for plastics, the three 'Rs' really are practiced here.

Kids helping out with dinner bathed in afternoon sunshine. Especially in the summer now school is out. About ten rotating teams of students cooking the morning rice over an open fire in a giant black pot-come-cauldron, plus fish paste and yellow bean curry-come-soup. It's all done like clockwork. It all happens and works because if the students didn't get up and cook the breakfast/dinner etc, there wouldn't be any.

When there's food preparation on the brain and a machete in the hand, concentration is the key.

.....eek! Ben's hidden camera and Roger Cook body suit is spotted by the chief caterer! ...she's seen me, but has she seen the self-sacrificing student climbing into the dinner pot behind her? Times are hard, and sometimes a student has to be eaten for the good of all the others.

Another area administered like clockwork: plates washed to the left, people to the right.

Three little missus from school practice their Burmese boogies in preparation for Burmese children's day - the birthday of Aung San Suu Kyi.

The 8th and 9th standard student dorm. Each dorm has its own name (this one's 'donna'). The students don't get the luxury of privacy that many of us enjoy at our convenient behest; lives are lived in the open, and the bonds between kids and the support they lend each other is phenomenal. They follow an unending but relaxed daily routine, always kept busy with the demands of the school or the camp - be it this week's cooking, cleaning, school sweeping or even the building of a new dorm - interdispersed with weightlifting, music, singing, reading, studying, eating, playing kayball or volleyball or football or table tennis on makeshift table, more singing and choral harmonies, visits to the caves, or sometime adventures with homemade spears, bows and arrows or catapaults. The vibrancy of the boarding houses is unending, energies oscillating with the temperatures of the day.

Each student has a small (80cm by 50 cm) mini-desk to study from (seen here in the foreground and background). This is the sight of considerable book pileage and is where all rote learning is done. The desks are versatile and moveable - the first time I knew the rock wasn't such a secret location? When I found such a desk perched atop it one lazy afternoon.

A thankful water supply. Here Pan Ai is captured slurping from the big red water filter and bringer of afternoon relief from thirst, headaches and the sun. The water being slurrped comes from the greenish filter on the right. Some students don't drink it as it doesn't guarantee you harm-free hydration - but most take the risk (not having the time or inclination to opt for the hot boiling variety in the heat of the day). Becoming increasingly fed up with having special water boiled for me, I've joined the throng and now slurp away from Big Red too. Fingers crossed.

A shot taken on my first day in the camp way back in November, the dorm of the younger boy students lined with students interested in the tall white totem about to enter their home and attempt some kind of first-hellos bonding with the help of a gregarious/performer-esque-when-apprehensive disposition and a few days' worth of Burmese language in the bag. Whenever you scoot past any of the dorms, there's always a call of hello (in a variety of languages) to greet your passing, always a friendly face to babble on to and attempt to entertain as they themselves try to figure you out.

Self-consciously bleating out a traditional Burmese song during the teacher's celebratory festival at the end of term. The chap on the left strums on the beautiful mandolin, the students on the right hug themselves in strained consciousness of 300 pairs of students' gazing eyes, and those of the teachers from behind, too... Not the most natural performers, it fitted well in a service which all seemed a little bit forced.

Effervescent, everpresent and eternally vivacious (that's the positive spin, others might say continually harassing), Win Win Yei (and sisters) are a daily, and when all is said and done, delightful, feature of life. Helping me in whatever task I might be doing, or teaching a bit of Burmese with emotional aplomb, she's currently without home and living in the canteen with her family (the father's the cook without the longyi) until a new home is built over by the school.

Ki May Htun. A sharp 9th-standard student, she wants to be a doctor when she's older - and she's certainly got the aptitude to become so. Folks here have to work so much harder to get 'there' (wherever that might be) - the obstacles (be they historical, social, legal, political, cultural, economic etc) are huge and for a woman being able to rise above the sole and commonplace destiny of 'wifedom' is a rare achievement. There are ways to get exceptional students to college and university - but without the funds it is near impossible to get them into five-year medical school. As foreigners, we are often told of such hopes and dreams early on in conversations. This may seem blunt, but even a bit of our disposable incomes would ultimately stretch a long, long way over here.

Here's Than Dar Pyo, former 10th standard student and now teacher trainee at the 3-month NHEC training happening over at Yaung Ni Oo during the summer. She's always first with a greeting and a smile (smile is, after all, the meaning of her name), and is considered by folks (male and female) here to be the most beautiful of girls because of her part-Indian, west-asian roots (this kind of difference is popular - others (black skin for example) sadly aren't). Here she's hanging up some of the girl dormitory's clothes, together with some of the teacher's - I still can't work out whether the girls want to be washing men's clothes, whether its a purely culturally-conditioned phenomenon, or whether its something they really can't stand (upon my arrival at the camp Than Dar Pyo asked almost daily to wash my extremely dirty clothes - I declined half out of principle and half out of dirt- and pong-embarrasment).

The daily wash down by the stream. A continuous exchange of students, soap, clothes smiles and toothpaste, washing isn't a private (in the case of bodily hygiene) or mechanised (re: clothes cleaning) affair. Soap powder and toothpaste is provided by some NGO or other. Toothbrushes are more difficult to come by - unfortunately for the kids this and the total absence of dentistry brings beautiful but often tainted smiles.

Here's Naw Htu, Naw Day Day and their mum, who visited her daughters for a couple of days back in early March. The boarding students - mostly of Karen ethnicity - come from a wide diversity of backgrounds, though their presence in the camp all ultimately stems from their persecution by the SPDC. Some have no family, some families have no money to house their kids, many pupils have made the journey from inside Burma alone to continue an education which inside the country often stops at primary level. For the older students it means they might not have seen their families for five or six years - the bonds of the boarding houses become so so important. Yet having said that, visits to the school by family members are not uncommon; parents often travel for days, on foot and at considerable risk, to get to see their children maybe once a year.

Hi.